Brett Terpstra wrote a good article on writing better markdown. In it he discusses some issues between different markdown processors with respect to lists. He uses a lot of different markdown editors had he is the author of Marked 2 which is, IMHO, a great app for previewing markdown files.

Another good source is Fetcher Penney's site who maintains the MultiMarkdown processor that Focused seems to use. See the MultiMarkdown documentation for a pretty good description of all the features. I appreciated when he added abbrevs for when I have to write technical papers with lots of acronyms.

I have always found adding a blank line before and after lists, headings, quotes, etc made for easier to read and process markdown.

It is a shame that the original spec didn't go into more detail with some of the markdown syntax, but then I bet John never thought it would become this popular.

Something to keep an eye on is the CommonMark project. It's aim is to provide a tight markdown spec along with a bunch of unit tests for testing a parser's compatibility. I think they have over 500 tests now!

John's work was ground breaking and over the years various extensions were built and faster parsers created. I like Fletcher's MultiMarkdown which includes John's original spec plus lots of well thought out extensions. Fletcher has released version 5 just recently and I have built his code on old Macs and Raspberry Pi. His build process includes lots of tests.

Common Mark is interesting but, IMHO, has a long way to go. I will be monitoring it.

Most of the time one doesn't need much more markdown than John's original spec. I use a lot of features that are only available now in MultiMarkdown.

I use Markdown a lot on my Rapidweaver sites, as most of them are information, rather than graphics, so Markdown is ideal.

The inconsistency of the way Markdown editors stick, or not, to the Markdown guidelines drives me up the wall. Particularly the two space at the end of a line for a line break rule. Some say they do, but don't and others make no mention of it, but do.

I like the look and feel of Typed/Focused, but have tended to use MultiMarkdown Composer. If Focused is going to be developed, then I would love to stick with it.

Totally agree with these thoughts. Err on the side of simplicity and getting the core functions right. If, indeed, there is an excellent library to use for the MMD formatting, then using it makes brilliant sense. It seems to be the biggest challenge in most Markdown editors.

Just making sure that you caught that formatting issue that I posted in the screenshot?

Hi ssh, I've just fixed the problem with the spacing you spotted on the lists. The spacing between an indented list item and the next line as shown in your screen shot now works correctly. I've dropped a screen shot below of your example list as it looks now.

I'm running the last set of regression tests and if everything passes then there should be an update out tomorrow.